Mkpoikana Udoma
Port Harcourt — Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, has said the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited’s reported admission that reopening the Port Harcourt Refinery is uneconomic, confirms his long-standing call for the privatisation of Nigeria’s state-owned refineries.
In a strongly worded statement, Atiku argued that continued public spending on moribund refineries amounts to a misallocation of scarce national resources, especially after $1.5 billion had already been expended on the Port Harcourt Refinery without commercial output.
“It is instructive that the Tinubu administration has finally come to terms with an inevitable truth: pouring public funds into moribund refineries is economically indefensible,” Atiku said.
The former Vice President criticised the practice of sustaining non-producing assets with public funds, noting that the refineries have become fiscal liabilities rather than strategic national infrastructure.
“Paying billions in salaries to facilities that produce not a single litre of petrol does not serve the national interest,” he stated.
Atiku said he had consistently advocated for privatisation of the refineries over the years but was met with political resistance and accusations of ulterior motives.
“For years, I advanced this patriotic position and was vilified and accused of plotting to sell public assets to ‘friends’,” he said, adding, “Today, the facts have caught up with the rhetoric.”
He described decades of turnaround maintenance programmes as costly failures that exposed “deep deficits in capacity, technical know-how, and financial discipline” within the public refinery system.
According to him, the most recent attempt to rehabilitate the refineries was driven by political considerations rather than economic logic.
“The latest push to ‘revive’ these refineries was driven by political pressure, not economic sense. Politics must never substitute for sound, transformative policy,” Atiku said.
The former Vice President warned against entering new refinery revival arrangements, including partnerships with foreign firms, arguing that such deals would merely recycle failed models.
“Accordingly, any proposed refinery deal, including with foreign partners, should be discontinued, as it merely repeats failed models,” he stated.
He maintained that Nigeria would have been better served by selling the refineries before rehabilitation efforts began, to limit public debt exposure and arrest the depreciation of assets he described as “liabilities.”
Atiku’s comments come amid renewed debate over the future of Nigeria’s state-owned refineries, as policymakers face mounting pressure to reform the downstream sector, reduce fiscal leakages and attract private capital into energy infrastructure.
